In The Octupus, one of the earliest muckraking novels of the Progressive Era, Frand Norris exposed the operations of the ruthless, laissez-faire capitalism sanctioned by turn-of-the-century Social Darwinists. The Pit, the second novel in Norris's projected trilogy, continues the 'Epic of the Wheat' with the story of Curtis Jadwin, a speculator bent on cornering the wheat market, and his brutally abused wife, Laura. Mingling realism and romanticism, Norris created in Laura a heroine whose psychological complexity rivals that of Flaubert's Madame Bovary or Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin's The Awakening.